


and the killer destroyed the monster

by bexgempisces



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Ghosts, Guilt, Haunting, I really don’t know how to tag this, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kind of a Happy Ending, LITERALLY, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Skye | Daisy Johnson Feels, Skye | Daisy Johnson Needs a Hug, Skye’s Shitty Childhood™️, Skye’s being haunted, Training to Cope, and then he disappears, he’s a ghost in this, it’s just kinda sad, rather dark tbh, skye let ward die, skye’s just feeling real shitty about it, sorry :(, sorry about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29392758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bexgempisces/pseuds/bexgempisces
Summary: Killer’s are born to destroy.And Skye has become a killer.Will she kill the monster or herself in the process?
Relationships: Melinda May & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 38





	and the killer destroyed the monster

**Author's Note:**

> this is, quite honestly, the most random thing i’ve ever written in the history of everything i’ve ever written 
> 
> like i can’t tell you which part of my brain it popped up from but it might be the place that holds all the dark poetic shit from reading beautiful creatures and being weirdly into bukowski as a kid who knows 
> 
> okay so basically, skye let mike kill ward on the plane instead of saving him and idk what that meant going forward but just assume that everything else still happened and this is in the interim between s1 and s2 
> 
> it starts soft too like a little insight into skye’s childhood and then bam angst so i’m sorry 
> 
> yeah...i don’t know how ward is haunting skye either, i wrote that she thinks it’s dimension hopping but it’s probably just her hallucinating from the lack of sleep and sheer amount of trauma that poor girl goes through in season 1 alone so...roll with it 
> 
> WARNINGS: blood, plenty of mentions of murder, slight vomit mentions, skye beating a punching bag, vague mentions of child abuse 
> 
> shit it’s 5am oops gotta stop doing that lol, don’t drink monster before bed kids :) 
> 
> okay enjoy this weird little mess i don’t really have words to describe it tbh 
> 
> oh and it’s inspired by like three other fics i read about skye killing ward in season 1 so thank you to whoever wrote those yall are great! 
> 
> -bex xx

When Skye was twelve years old, she was in foster home number nine, the Dylan’s. They had a son, Oliver, he was fourteen and entirely unhappy about Skye’s existence. To be fair, so was Skye. 

But one night, after she’d been there for around two months, he came into her room after she’d had a nightmare. Initially, she’d laid as still as she could, tucking into a tiny ball to try and protect herself because she’d been in this situation before and she wasn’t going to make it as easy this time. 

(That’s what she’d told herself anyway. Three years after that she’d be in the exact same position and Michael Trenton did exactly what she thought Oliver was going to do.) 

But Oliver was a gangly, thick rimmed glasses and head in a book kind of boy instead. And he didn’t try anything, gave her space instead, until she’d stopped shaking and peeked out of her protective ball. 

(Looks could be deceiving, but Oliver at least gave her hope. It would be cruelly snatched away at the next foster home because the dad looked like an older Oliver, but for the time being, it was okay.) 

“What do you want?” She’d whispered to him. He stared at her in the darkness and took note of the open closet door, (she could see the monsters and easily hide from them too)the long shard of glass under pillow, (snatched from the orphanage and forgotten at this exact foster home, it protected her for around three years) and her wary eyes, and smiled softly. He held his palms wide to show he meant no harm. 

(She will come to learn that open palms and a kind smile can be just as terrifying as closed fists and a sneer.) 

“I heard you shout.” He explained and she flushed. She was twelve for gods sake, she didn’t need them to see her as a baby. She had long since given up on the hope of being adopted but people were meaner to crybabies. 

“I’m sorry.” She said immediately, having conditioned herself to apologise as a precaution. They didn’t get as mad if you apologised. 

“I get nightmares too.” He said, looking down at his dinosaur printed pajama pants. 

(In four years when Skye runs from the worst foster home in existence, the first thing she will buy will be dinosaur pajamas, a reminder of the nice fourteen year old who was kind to her.) 

“What about?” She had asked in practical amazement. Oliver had two loving parents, lived in a good neighbourhood, went on yearly family vacations, was on his schools debate team and had straight As. What the hell did he have to nightmare about? 

(She scolds herself for thinking that way. Nightmares and fear can be caused by anything.) 

“Clowns mostly. The occasional spider. Oh, had this horrible one about this giant snake that I think was inspired by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Pretty dumb stuff but it’s scary when it’s happening.” He flushed a little in embarrassment and she tried not to laugh. His nightmares sounded like a cakewalk compared to hers. 

“Must be nice.” She said sarcastically. He frowned but she didn’t offer any explanation or information about her own nightmares. 

“Anyway, when I can’t sleep, I like to read. Mom used to read to me when I was little and I kept hold of the habit. I, uh, brought you a book to see if it would help you?” He said sheepishly, holding out the book he had tucked in the back of his pajama pants. She was so caught off guard that she just stared at him for a good minute. 

No one had ever,  _ ever  _ done something like this for Skye. She simply wasn’t worth the hassle or the time or the attention and she’d come to accept this early in life. So when Oliver offered his book she actually didn’t know what to do and just stared at the proffered book like it was a bomb. 

“I- why are you being so nice to me?” She blurts out instead and he blinks rapidly at her trying to decipher what she had just asked. 

“No one deserves to face their demons on their own.” He offered simply and she looked him dead in the eyes, searching for the lie or con or bargain in his green irises. She finds nothing but teenage awkwardness and innocent kindness. 

“What do you want for it?” She asks, praying it’s not going to hurt more in the long run. 

(It doesn’t hurt this time, but it will at the next foster home, and it hurts more than anything.) 

“Nothing, Mary.” She hasn’t started calling herself Skye anywhere but her own head but she still flinches at her name. “I don’t want anything from you.” 

“That sounds too good to be true.” She says quietly, because it does. Everything comes with a price. She’d known that since she was old enough to comprehend the idea. 

(The pattern will continue throughout her life. Everything comes with a price and everything is always too good to be true. It’s exhausting but she knows the game.) 

“I promise it’s not. I’ll leave the book here, okay?” He places the book on the end of the bed and stands to leave. “No one will hurt you here Mary.” 

(But she had been told that before. She will continue to be told that. She will never believe it.) 

“Thank you.” She says honestly and he gives her a hopeful smile that she can’t return. He shuts the door quietly and she tracks his footsteps to the room across the hall from her own (a strange concept on its own since she’s gotten so used to sharing.) hears the soft click of a door and the rustle of sheets as Oliver gets back in bed. She counts all the way to one hundred in her head, then counts it in the Spanish they’re learning in school and then again in English before she moves to grab the book. 

It’s a brand new book, something else she’s completely foreign to the concept of. It’s the first Hunger Games, the cover a stark black with a strange bird in the middle. She runs her fingers over the uncracked spine and opens the first page. She smiled a little as she read the note Oliver left. 

_ Mom got two by accident, you can keep this one. Hope it helps! Sleep well, Mary.  _

_ -Oliver  _

She pulls the flashlight she’d stolen three foster homes ago out of her still packed backpack, (she never unpacked, and she never would) and wrapped the brand new purple blanket they’d given to her around her shoulders as she opened the first page of the story. 

* * *

Skye had thought she’d become well adapted at spotting liars. At discovering the snake in the grass, at telling truth from fiction, at keeping distance. She thought that she wouldn’t let herself get hurt again. 

She thought wrong. 

(Like she always did. _Fuck_ , when she was going to learn?) 

Ward slithered past all her defences, walls and barricades, dismantled her artillery and placed a ticking time bomb in her lungs. 

They tell her it isn’t her fault. There was no way she could have predicted that she’d come to trust a murderer and a liar and a double agent and- and- and- 

There are too many words and yet big enough to describe the monster that Ward was. 

(“was” being the key word there. “was”. Three letters have never seemed so terrifying.) 

And they tell her it isn’t her fault but she can’t believe them because it has happened before. She had trusted in the adults supposed to be looking after her as a child and all it had brought her was pain. She had trusted in foster brothers to stay out of her bed. She had trusted in the world to not be so cruel. 

(The world was a sadistic son of a bitch.) 

Skye had thought her fragile heart had finally been mended enough for her to love someoneagain. For her to try to let someone in, to let someone love her. 

She let the wrong one in and now black inky poison is spreading through her veins, injected from his fingertips and she can almost see it when the light is just so. She doesn’t know what will kill her first, the poison, the bomb, or the ghost.

* * *

Skye had never believed in ghosts but she fully believed she’s being haunted now. 

Ward’s body is there whenever she closes her eyes, whenever she looks in a mirror, around corners and out of the corner of her eye and in her room at night. His empty eyes stare into hers, body writhing in pain as his heart attack set in and she did nothing. 

She let him die. Somewhere, deep down she knows she should feel bad. That she should have been a bit more humanity than this, he was a person after all and this makes her a murderer- 

(That thought makes her breath stop and she can feel the time on the clock on the bomb in her lungs decrease and the poison begin to swirl.) 

She’s in the bathroom, about to hop in the shower after a training session with May and she sees him again. An all too familiar panic creeps in of being trapped in a bathroom anywhere near him. The edges of her vision cloud to zero in on his body. The world feels off, like she has somehow crossed dimensions to whatever hellhole he’d been sent to that seemed determined to chase her too. 

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” She whispers, practically begs the phantom. Ward’s empty eyes stare back into her soul, he blinks and the stupid smile that used to make her feel warm in the mornings during training makes her stomach roll when she sees it on his dead face. 

“You killed me. Didn’t know you had it in you Rookie.” His voice is faraway and all too close at the same time. Her throat feels like it’s being closed, Quinn’s fingers tightening there again and Ward’s wandering hands when he kidnapped her. Her eyes fill with tears. 

“I had to.” She chokes out. 

“Did you?” His voice is right inside her head, a booming echo threatening to crack her skull in half. She bangs her fist against her head but it does nothing to dislodge the voice she once found comforting. 

“You were HYDRA. You betrayed us. You hurt me.” Her own voice is small and weak but she believes what she’s saying. She had never believed anything more. She did not regret killing him. 

(And she can’t feel the vibrations of heartbeats yet, but she knows that all she would find of the phantom Ward was pure and utter emptiness.) 

“And so you had to kill me, Skye?” She hates the way he says her name. It sounds like the foster brothers of her past and made her skin feel like it was on fire. 

“Yes. I don’t regret it and I would do it again, but I’m sorry you’re dead. Will you leave me alone now?” Her voice is a bit stronger now, the world is beginning to right itself. He frowns uncertainly at the light beginning to peek in again. The pressure of the bomb in her lungs is beginning to ease, the poison veins are beginning to unfurl. He is leaving her. 

“You’re a killer now, Rookie. Don’t ever forget that. Katniss might have been fighting for survival but that doesn’t change the fact that she was a murderer just like you.” His voice is practically a whisper, and he’s fading from her world, hopefully forever but his grip tightens on her arm one last time. “You are a killer Skye.” 

“I can live with that.” She says resolutely. His grip bruises her forearm but it is a phantom pain, like when her years old healed bones ache in the rain or when it’s cold. The bomb is gone and so is the poison and so is Ward. 

The light returns and she sinks to the shower floor and sobs. 

(Because she suddenly misses Ward who taught her to shoot and who she beat at Battleship and who saved her life. And then she remembers who he really was and vomits.)

Her fingers ghost over her bullet wounds in her stomach. It was his organisation that did this, his leader that ordered she be shot to see if he could live. The rough skin is cool to the touch and she lets the warm water spray over her too cold body. 

She sits for a long time in the shower, the water beating down her back like a metronome and it’s almost soothing. She lets the water wash away his touch, scratches at her arms to rid herself of her phantom grip, practically destroys her face to escape his dead touch on her face when he kissed her at Providence. 

There was no blood when Ward died but Skye can see it now. It coats her fingers and arms, all the way up to her chest and stops at her heart. It spreads like veins, scarlet tendrils that make her throw up again. 

(The world was a sadistic son of a bitch and had decided she needed a visual reminder of what she’d done.) 

So she scrubbed and she scrubbed and she scrubbed. Her mind flashes back to a nun doing this to her with carbolic soap and holy water when she was young and was screaming about her second foster family abusing her. Sister Addams and Father Moritz said she had the devil in her. 

(Skye’s beginning to think they may have been right.) 

But she continues scrubbing and her skin is bleeding but fresh blood is good because it rids her of Ward’s. 

_You are a killer Skye._

And killers are born to destroy.

* * *

After the shower from hell and her last ever visit from Ward, she starts going to the punching bag at night. 

Every single night she hammers her fists against the harsh leather until they split and fresh blood breaks loose and coats her knuckles in her penance. 

“You’re going to hurt yourself.” May tells her gently, more gently than Skye will ever deserve, one night after a week of this. 

(Everything comes with a price. She survived Ward by killing him but the price was living after that.) 

“Maybe I deserve it.” Skye said quietly, punching a little harder at May’s frown. She did not need help or coddling or whatever. 

“Why?” May asked and Skye wanted to laugh, because wasn’t it obvious? 

“I’m a killer.” 

“You didn’t actually kill him.” May points out. Skye scoffs and goes back to her punching, blood running down her knuckles. 

“I let him die. That’s just as bad.” Possibly worse because she had to opportunity to save him and she didn’t. 

And just because she isn’t being haunted anymore doesn’t mean she doesn’t see Ward’s lifeless eyes when she closes her eyes. 

“If you’re going to be a good agent, you have to get used to this feeling.” May said and Skye sighed because she already knew this. Sometimes they took lives because it was necessary. 

But had this been necessary? Was it really just her being a good agent or was it just the killer in her finally being set free? 

“I’m sorry.” She whispered, practically a reflex at this point. Skye wasn’t entirely sure who it was aimed at, May or Ward or herself. She just had to say it before her brain travelled too far down the path of necessities and killers and penance and making sure Ward and his shadow realm that left her covered in invisible blood made a return. 

(She will soon learn that she will never fully escape it, it will just become easier to bear.) 

“Go to bed Skye. We can talk about this tomorrow.” May tells her and she nods, once, twice, before finally lifting her bloodied knuckles from the punching bag and heading out of the gym. 

She winds up in the bathroom again, but she leaves the door cracked open to allow the light from outside in. She puts all the lights on and plays loud music over the noise of the shower, eyes clenched shut the whole time to ensure she does not see the phantom Ward and his accusations and lied and truths and poison and bombs and shadows. 

That night is the first in many she does not see black blood entrenching her arms. 

(That night is the first night it begins to get better.) 

She dresses in her dinosaur printed pajama pants and an oversized Harley Davidson shirt she’d had since she was ten. She brushed her teeth and looks at the girl in the mirror. 

That night is the first night in many she does not see a killer.

(That night is the first night in many she sees a person who made a choice, and chose to live.) 

There are two copies of The Hunger Games in her bunk. One is a very battered copy with a scrawled note inside from a boy who wanted to help his foster sister, and one is an equally battered copy belonging to the traitor she let die. 

Skye pulls a lighter out of her bag.

(To this day she doesn’t unpack.) 

She grabs her lighter, purple blanket and a higher grade flashlight she bought when she escaped the foster system and heads to her closet, the door still propped open like always. 

She is the monster in the closet this time. 

(She thinks she’s okay with that.) 

She drops Ward’s book in a bucket found at the back of her closet, (god knows why it’s there) and flicks the lighter until it catches fire and then she drops it on the book. 

She watches the flames lick the pages of the book in the metal bucket and the whole thing catches fire in a matter of minutes. This is definitely unsafe and probably rather dramatic, but Skye can’t quite bring herself to care. 

She is letting go. She spent a couple of months being haunted and she’s tired of phantom Nazi’s and invisible blood. The book burns and she imagines Ward burning with it. 

When the book is no more than embers and ashes she douses the fire with a water bottle and places it in a sink. She goes back to her room and back to her closet, wrapping herself up in the purple blanket and flicking her flashlight on to crack open the first page of her own copy of The Hunger Games, Oliver’s messy scrawl making her eyes mist up but she’ll blame it on the flames she watched for half an hour. 

A killer is born to destroy. 

So she destroyed the monster. 

**Author's Note:**

> uh thoughts?


End file.
